The Solitary Child Read online

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  Contents

  Nina Bawden

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nina Bawden

  The Solitary Child

  Nina Bawden

  Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children – Carrie’s War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry – have become contemporary classics.

  She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured – but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter’s Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

  Chapter One

  “What a way to hear!” said my mother.

  Her heavy, handsome face was patchy with cold, the wide, sensual mouth tightened into a kind of denial. She spoke as if I had subjected her to some appalling indignity.

  I avoided her eyes. “You must be frozen,” I said.

  I opened the cupboard door and jerked at the flex of the electric fire. The pile of notes and newspapers that lay on top of it slid out into the room. Half-heartedly, I tried to push them back and, failing, left the door jammed open. I felt her eyes on my bent neck as I knelt to plug in the fire.

  I said brightly, into the stillness, “How long have you been waiting? I’m sorry I wasn’t in. It must have been a beastly journey. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  The words trailed emptily between us. She did not answer. I lit a cigarette at the bar of the fire and the sparks spluttered as the paper caught.

  The issue, could be evaded no longer.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told you before.”

  I had tried. I had telephoned in the afternoon, standing in the hall, my feet cold on the linoleum. The noises of the city came through the coloured fanlight above the street door, hushed by the creeping fog. There was a click at the other end of the line and then my mother’s voice, high and thin and faintly nasal, speaking the number in a slow, carefully enunciated way. She did this in case the caller was in a telephone box and had dialled the wrong number. Her life had always been charted in such a fashion, allowing for precisely envisaged, if unimaginative contingencies. It was not altruism; she found positive pleasure in knowing that she considered other people. All her charity was conscientious, her thoughtfulness a kind of narcissism.

  I asked her how she was and then I said, “I’m going to get married.”

  I hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. But I was unprepared, as always, for the extent to which she unnerved me so that, at the sound of the distant voice, I became immediately awkward, returning to the familiar hostility of childhood.

  She said, “Harriet, dear,” and was silent. Complaint had sounded a clearer note than pleasure.

  I began to apologise. “Mother, I would have liked to tell you before it was settled. But it has all happened so quickly.”

  “You are always so brisk.” Annoyance was now completely unveiled. I told myself: it is absurd, at twenty-two, to care so much about anyone’s possible displeasure. Particularly when you have grown up with it and know it has no more significance than any other habit, acquired slowly over the disappointing years, as a defence against the fear of being unwanted, against the fancied slight.

  “I’m sorry. Would you like me to come and see you this evening?”

  “There’s fog on the line.” Her voice was coldly wary as if she suspected that I knew the offer would be refused.

  I said, “It’s not too bad, I’d love to come,” trying to sound eager for the sad, suburban journey, anxious for her company.

  She answered, with more warmth, “No, you mustn’t come. It’s very thick here.… It would be ridiculous.” Then, “Do I know him, dear? I do so hope you will be happy.”

  The hall was dewy with fog. The walls were running with it.

  “I don’t think you do. We haven’t known each other very long.”

  She was determined to be cheerful. “Well, I know that young people always rush into things nowadays. But I’m not sure that anything is gained by waiting. Who is he?”

  The wallpaper in the hall was stained with damp. High up in the frieze a large piece had curled away from the plaster and looped, speckled like a toad, above the rack of hanging mackintoshes and the naked bulb. There was a smell, permanent and unvarying, of cat.

  “His name is James Random.” I said it very clearly so there could be no mistake. I had expected, I think, immediate understanding and dismay; when it did not come I knew that I had hoped, all along, that she would remember.

  Her voice was gay. “A nice, solid name. Now, tell me something important about him.”

  The archness of her tone, the bright expectation of girlish confidences, constricted my throat. I stared at the dreary wall and tried to think of something acceptably important about James. I remembered, inconsequentially, my mother saying when I was a little girl, “There is one thing I will say for Harriet”—as if there was nothing else at all to be said for me—”she is a very brave child.” When I was older I had wondered if she had praised my courage deliberately, knowing that with her I was never brave.

  I wasn’t brave now. I had meant to be; I had meant to tell her now and get it over so that there would be a single scene and an end to it. I had even rehearsed what I would say to her. Now, with the waiting silence at the other end of the line, I couldn’t do it.

  I said slowly, “He’s a farmer. A rather rich one. You might call him landed gentry, I suppose, if it didn’t sound so out of date.” I stopped, feeling wretchedly deceitful. “He’s been married before.”

  There was a pause during which she made allowances, took a broadminded view.

  “Well, dear, divorce is fairly common to-day. Naturally, my generation feel more strongly about it than yours, but then we shall soon be dead.” She gave a small, embarrassed cough. Delicately, she added, “You were
not in any way involved, Harriet dear?”

  Absurdly, alone in the cold hall, I blushed. “His wife died about two years ago.”

  “Oh, I see.” The relief was almost visible.

  I said, “Death isn’t always respectable.” Flirting with truth, knowing that I must sound flippant.

  She was acid. “There is no need to try to shock me, Harriet. You should have grown out of tilting at windmills. It is a sign of adolescence.”

  My fingers were white and dead to the knuckle bone. There was no point in going on although, by not telling her now I laid myself open to endless charges of deceit.

  I said forlornly, “She killed herself,” thinking of the Sunday papers and the hopeless women in gas-filled kitchens, the unbearable lives. There was no answer and I knew she was considering the correct attitude. Grief for the suicide would be proper but a little unnatural; she had been dead too long. But pleasure, because James was now free to marry me, was inappropriate also. She would not find the predicament funny.

  I said, “I’ll come home at the week-end,” and thought of telling her about James in the comfortable, tasteless drawing-room, uniformly oatmeal, decorated with the kind of pictures that are easy to live with.

  “That will be nice, dear. Will you bring James?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing. I’ll let you know in plenty of time.”

  I put the telephone down and scowled at my reflection in the spotted mirror on the hallstand. My face, framed by khaki mackintoshes, was slightly out of focus. There was a smudge on my cheek and I scrubbed at it with my handkerchief, peering closely because the light was bad and the silvering was almost gone behind the glass.

  The landlady’s ginger cat came squawling from the basement and coiled round my legs. I picked him up and he squirmed against my shoulder, eyes dreamily closed, softly purring, plunging his claws into the stuff of my dress. I stroked his slender, sensual body, reluctant to go upstairs, reluctant to admit that I had not told her the truth.

  He had known that I was unwilling to telephone her and had half guessed the truth. He had said, “I didn’t think you were frightened of anyone. You are too old to be scared of your mother.” He was smiling but his eyes had narrowed with the sharp fear that I might be, in spite of myself, ashamed of him. I had said that of course I was not afraid, that I would tell her now, this minute. And I had not told her.

  He was waiting for me upstairs, occupied with the entrails of my wireless which he had offered to mend for me. The mechanic at the corner shop had said it was too old to repair, but James had insisted that I let him try. When I came into the room he would look up gravely and expectantly, waiting for me to tell him what my mother had said.

  Of course I could tell him a lie and then put it right by ringing again later, once he had gone. It would be easy to lie to James. Easier than telling him the truth, because he would see it as evidence of the doubt that he expected to find in me, watching me with a kind of sad distrust, unable to believe in my faith and love and pride.

  I ran upstairs. Old and outraged, the cat bounced on my shoulder. I flung open the door.

  My voice was loud. “I didn’t tell her.”

  Firelight danced on the distempered walls, on the shabby boarding-house furniture, and on James’s lifted, inquiring face. The wariness that had become habitual flickered across his face in a swift puckering and sagging of flesh so that he looked, momentarily, much older.

  I amended quickly, “The line was terrible. Alive with ghosts and gremlins. She could barely hear me. It would have been quite useless. I’ll see her and tell her then.”

  The half-truth was easy. I smiled at him with relief.

  He said, “Do you know, you look a different person when you’ve been talking to your mother? Like a sullen little girl.”

  “She says I’m sulky.”

  “If you look like that when you’re with her, I’m not surprised. Come and get warm.” He collected the bits of the wireless and put them on the table.

  “Have you fixed it?”

  He hunched his shoulders. “It’s a long job. I don’t think it can be done.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Because I like fixing things.”

  “Not when it’s impossible, surely.

  He grinned wryly, “I like to try. It’s a sort of pride.”

  We crouched together on the hearth rug in domestic warmth, the cold world excluded beyond the drawn curtains. We toasted crumpets and made tea. Hunched like a sphinx, the ginger cat lapped at a saucer of milk. James did not talk. He had grown used to silence and he sat, drinking his tea and eating his buttered crumpets, staring into the fire. He had one of those indistinct, English faces that can occasionally astonish by their anonymity; sandy, nervous and boney. The cheekbones were high and flat on either side of the narrow nose, the mouth was thin and compassionate and beautifully shaped. The features were excellent, the whole effect a little blurred so that once, meeting him on a crowded station, I was surprised to find how easily he might have been a stranger. Normally, when we were with other people, his face was starched and immobile as if he had schooled himself not to show expression; now, relaxed by the fire, he looked candid and tender, younger than his thirty-eight years.

  He looked at me and smiled and I tried to see him through my mother’s eyes: well bred, public school but not university, monied but unpretentious. All, in fact, that she considered desirable. I wondered whether these things would count, once she had been told the truth.

  I had known him for twelve days and been engaged to him for six.

  We had met at a party. There seemed to be no other way of meeting people in London; each chance invitation was a gateway to a less restricted future. Lally Pettigrew, who gave the party, put it more crudely.

  I had known Lally since I was a Fourth-former in long, black stockings and she, glamorously and unsuitably, it seemed, was in the Sixth. She had gone to Oxford, I to a provincial university, and we had met, after a lapse of years, at the Mexican Art Exhibition.

  She had seemed very adult and wise; she had been married and divorced and I was gratified by her interest in me.

  I knew, but did not like, most of the people at her party. She introduced me to James and left us together in a corner. Afterwards, I learned that it was the first time for two years that he had deliberately put himself in the way of meeting strangers and that, in a way, accepting Lally’s invitation had been a calculated action of extraordinary courage. There had been no hint of this in his manner unless in a certain defensive aggressiveness which might have been a part of his character. In fact, he was completely unaggressive, a gentle person and very vulnerable.

  He did not expect the same trust of others. He told me about himself very early on; to be exact, after Lally’s party.

  He asked if he could take me home, and at that moment Hughie Walters blundered over to our corner with a tray. He offered me a drink solemnly, like a libation.

  I said I was just going, and Hughie’s face crumpled into diffident despair.

  “Already? Oh, Harry—we’re going to dance.”

  He gestured through the screen of smoke at the ancient gramophone that was always drawn into wheezing service at Lally’s parties.

  “I don’t want to dance. I’ve got a corn on my toe.”

  “Couldn’t you put a plaster on it?”

  “It’s all right. It doesn’t hurt. James is taking me home.”

  “Oh! Sorry. Didn’t mean to barge in.”

  Hughie nodded ineffectually at James and crashed away like a wounded elephant. A few minutes later the gramophone began to play “How Much is that Doggie in the Window.”

  “You weren’t very kind to that young man.”

  He sounded amused but reproachful.

  “He’s used to it. Tact is wasted on Hughie. He’s always doting on someone—at the moment he’s got a thing about me.”

  “And have you got a thing about him?”

  Hughie was very young and ve
ry faithful; the indulgent question made my affection for him seem suddenly absurd.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s still young and dewy. He was at Exeter with me.”

  “Exeter?”

  “It’s a university as well as a city. Don’t apologise. I’m used to having to explain.”

  We went to a little pub in a mews off Belgrave Square. I think it was called the Grenadier. He bought us each a double whisky and then told me his story, bringing it out with a kind of straightforward bleakness that was impersonal and, at the same time, savage.

  Later, I knew that the brutality was intended; that he was only anxious not to achieve anything, not even a temporary friendship, on a basis of what he would have thought false pretences. But at the time I was appalled. Not entirely by the story because that seemed—at the time, anyway—to be almost unbelievable, but by his blurting it out so clumsily and publicly to me, a stranger. For a little time I thought he was boasting, dragging in the unsavoury past as a kind of shabby success.

  The pub was hot and full of people; we were sitting at a table in the corner. No one could have heard what he said. Nevertheless, I was covered with embarrassment both for myself and for him; I stared at him silently and wished the earth would open at my feet and swallow me.

  He got clumsily to his feet and said, “I’m sorry. This was a mistake, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t meant to shock.”

  His eyes were bright with shame and a kind of anguish so that I knew at once the mistake I had made and yet could think of nothing to say to put it right. I was afraid, with a sudden, ashamed pity, that he was going to cry.

  He said, “I know it’s bad-mannered to leave you alone in a pub. But worse-mannered to insist on taking you home.”

  He made his stiff little speech and pushed his way through the close-packed crowd without saying good-bye to me. He was so quick that by the time I had collected my gloves and bag and stood up, he was gone. I could see, beyond the shoulders of the people crushed in front of me, the door swing open and shut and the top of his fair, departing head.